"I wish I could communicate to you, and especially to those of you who are just now beginning your professional careers in a world of statistics incredibly more sophisticated than that of Karl Pearson's day, something of the thrill in meeting in person and studying under a man of Pearson's immense reputation. Author of the Grammar of Science, perfector of simple linear correlations; inventor of multiple and partial correlation, of curvilinear correlation, of tetrachoric and bi- serial correlation; discoverer of the \chi^2 function for summarizing multinomial data with magnificent simplicity; builder of a beautiful system of frequency curves derived from a single differential equation which in turn harked back to the hypergeometric series; founder of ' and author or co-author of a prolific literature applying these new statistics to biological and sociological data - Karl Pearson was a hero of to an American boy vouchsafed a visit to the home of the gods. Indeed, Pearson was Thor himself - for the thunderbolts with which he attacked unsparingly those who dared oppose him were echoing and reechoing."
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Philosophers from EnglandUniversity of Cambridge facultyMathematicians from EnglandBiographers from EnglandStatisticians
Original Language: English
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Sources
S.A. Stouffer, "Karl Pearson - An Appreciation on the 100th Anniversary of His Birth", Journal of the American Statistical Association, Vol. 53 (1958), pp. 23-27.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Karl_Pearson
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Karl Pearson
Karl Pearson (27 March 1857 – 27 April 1936) was an influential English mathematician and biostatistician. He founded the world's first university statistics department at University College London in 1911.
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